"Shut up," the 'Progressives' Explained

The apocryphal Sinclair Lewis quote has been proven wrong:

Fascism has arrived in America, and it isn't wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. It is a false-flag operation wrapped in Progressive PC Speech Codes of "Tolerance" and "Diversity" and carrying a Rainbow flag, the sword of islam and the Democrat party logo.

In saying this, I do not indict all muslims, all gay people, or all Democrats. Instead, I indict the small-in-number, large-in-mouth leftwing fasci (predominately guilty white latte leftists) in this country who brilliantly manipulate symbols and emotion to mau-mau ordinary Americans into sitting down and shutting up.  Normal people detest how this agenda-driven outrage kabuki has trashed our public discourse, but the leftwing cray cray's march on.

The regressive Progs are out in the open now with their hostility to our God-given liberties. They've abandoned reasoned argument and now are all about harnessing government's coercive power to tell you to sit down and shut up.  When that doesn't work, community organizers and professional indignation coordinators take to twitter and other social media to crowd-source outraged mobs.

I quote copiously from Mark Steyn, because he has written an especially brilliant article on the subject.

Academic Earplugs

A ditzy dingbat from Swarthmore really did say this:

‘What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.’

Mark Steyn's response:

Yeah, who needs that? There speaks the voice of a generation: celebrate diversity by enforcing conformity.

In theory, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is everything the identity-group fetishists dig: female, atheist, black, immigrant. If conservative white males were to silence a secular women’s rights campaigner from Somalia, it would be proof of the Republican party’s ‘war on women’, or the encroaching Christian fundamentalist theocracy, or just plain old Andrew Boltian racism breaking free of its redoubt at the Herald Sun to rampage as far as the eye can see. But when the snivelling white male who purports to be president of Brandeis (one Frederick Lawrence) does it out of deference to Islam, Miss Hirsi Ali’s blackness washes off her like a bad dye job on a telly news anchor.

He decries Britain's aging performing arts community's lust for shutting people up, when they themselves stormed the censor's barricades back in the 60's:

This is the aging of the dawn of Aquarius: new blasphemy laws for progressive pieties. [...] But, once you get a taste for shutting people up, it’s hard to stop. Why bother winning the debate when it’s easier to close it down?

Steyn explains the importance of free speech in a democratic society:

Nick Lowles defined the ‘No Platform’ philosophy as ‘the position where we refuse to allow fascists an opportunity to act like normal political parties’. But free speech is essential to a free society because, when you deny people ‘an opportunity to act like normal political parties’, there’s nothing left for them to do but punch your lights out. Free speech, wrote the Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson last week, ‘buttresses the political system’s legitimacy. It helps losers, in the struggle for public opinion and electoral success, to accept their fates. It helps keep them loyal to the system, even though it has disappointed them. They will accept the outcomes, because they believe they’ve had a fair opportunity to express and advance their views. There’s always the next election. Free speech underpins our larger concept of freedom.’

"The (Fill in the Blank) is Settled!" 

Young Erin Ching at Swarthmore College has grasped the essential idea: it is not merely that, as the Big Climate enforcers say, ‘the science is settled’, but so is everything else, from abortion to gay marriage.

So what’s to talk about?

Universities are no longer institutions of inquiry but ‘safe spaces’ where delicate flowers of diversity of race, sex, orientation, ‘gender fluidity’ and everything else except diversity of thought have to be protected from exposure to any unsafe ideas.

"Progressives:"  Bringing Middle East-Style Obscurantism to the West!

As it happens, the biggest ‘safe space’ on the planet is the Muslim world. For a millennium, Islamic scholars have insisted, as firmly as a climate scientist or an American sophomore, that there’s nothing to debate. And what happened? As the United Nations Human Development Programme’s famous 2002 report blandly noted, more books are translated in Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years. Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can’t bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast.

As American universities, British playwrights and Australian judges once understood, the ‘safe space’ is where cultures go to die.

Illiberal Regressives

There in nothing more intolerant in this country than today's mis-named, self-proclaimed 'liberals.' At least some of them have dropped 'liberal' and taken up the old school authoritarian monicker of progressive, but even that is a lie. They are dragging society backwards to the bad old days when dissent was punished by the state or mob violence.

Mark Steyn - The Slow Death of Free Speech

See also:
Progressives are wrong about the Essence of the Constitution
Liberals Attack Female Fighting Misogyny